For a laptop this inexpensive, the Lenovo IdeaPad 100S looks anything but cheap. Available in red, blue, gray or white, Lenovo’s low-cost laptop has a classy matte finish that carries the accent color and persists from the lid to the system’s bottom. The rubber feet match the color, but the sides and deck are a subtle black color with a similar matte texture, which did a good job of resisting fingerprints.
At 11.5 x 7.95 x .69 inches and 2.2 pounds, the Lenovo IdeaPad 100S felt incredibly light and portable, both in my hands and my bag. The Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 11 is nearly the same size(11.5 x 7.95 x .7 inches), but weighs -.2 pounds more, while the Lenovo 100S Chromebook - the Chrome OS version of this laptop - is slightly larger and heavier(11.81 x 8.23 x 0.78 inches, 2.52 pounds). The Asus EeeBook X205TA(11.2 x 7.6 x 0.6, 2.16 pounds) is ever so slightly smaller and lighter, however.
While most Windows PCs come with hard drives or SSDs that have hundreds of gigabytes of capacity, ultralow-cost laptops such as the IdeaPad 100S, HP Stream and Acer One Cloudbook series typically come with 16, 32 or 64GB of eMMC storage memory. The IdeaPad 100S comes with 32GB; 17GB of that is free, with the rest taken up by Windows 10. You can expand the storage by purchasing an inexpensive microSD card, which gives you another 64GB for just$20, or you can use some of the 1TB of cloud storage that comes with the included Office 365 subscription.
The 11.6-inch, 1366 x 768 display for the IdeaPad 100S isn’t as colorful or sharp as those on expensive laptops, but it provides surprisingly good image quality with wide viewing angles. When I watched a trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I could easily make out fine details like the beads of sweat on Finn’s brow. Most colors, including the red in a First Order flag, seemed mostly accurate, though a bit muted. However, even at a full 90 degrees to the left or right, the colors barely faded.
Considering that it’s powered by a low-cost, 1.33-GHz Intel Atom Z3735F CPU and 2GB of RAM, the Lenovo IdeaPad 100S offers really solid performance that’s good enough for Web surfing, editing documents, viewing movies and multitasking. When I had a dozen Chrome browser tabs open, I was able to watch a YouTube trailer of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in one window while editing a Google doc in another, without a hint of lag. Performance was equally smooth when 100S was playing an offline clip in Windows Media Player.
The IdeaPad 100S lasted a strong 9 hours and 48 minutes on the Laptop Battery Test, which involves continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi at 100 nits of brightness. That’s well ahead of the Acer Cloudbook 11’s time of 8 hours and 4 minutes. However, the Asus EeeBook X205TA lasted a full 12:05, while Lenovo’s 100 Chromebook endured for 11:19.
The Lenovo IdeaPad 100S offers a ton of value, combining long battery life, an attractive design, solid performance and free Office 365. This laptop would be an even more compelling choice if its keyboard, which generally feels good, did not flex and its touchpad supported gestures. If you want even better endurance in this price range, consider the Asus EeeBook X205TA, which lasted a full 12 hours on a charge, but has a dimmer display and comes with Windows 8 instead of Windows 10.
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